I have had some serious ups and downs with Hollow Knight. On one hand, it's built on a flawed design document, encouraging free movement and exploration with the story but all the while doing everything it can to stop you from doing the thing the game is supposed to be about. The end result is frustration, slow paced navigation, and a loss of anything that could be considered "exploring". The fact that the map is locked away and even when you get it is nearly unusable is just inexcusable. There's never a way to truly understand where you're going or why you're going that way. It doesn't teach you how to get stronger or leave even a tiny hint as to where to get upgrades. There is no natural pathing; just an eternal labyrinth.

The lack of direction and scarcity of checkpoints are totally unfair and stacked against the player in every way. Most boss fights don't' have a checkpoint anywhere near them, so by the time you get back to the boss you're back to 1 health. It's very easy to loose all your souls and very difficult to collect more. Fast travel is a total joke, and it's so useless and spread out it may as well not even be in the game. Hollow Knight is basically artificially lengthened by the extreme difficulty which is mostly the result of the checkpoint system.

The reward for finding anything in Hollow Knight is typically just death, and losing the items and money you've been so meticulously collecting. However, 20 hours in now and having picked it up again after 3 years I do want to keep playing it. After using a bunch of guides to find all the level ups and get my guy up to snuff, I'm much more confident traversing the underground. I still maintain this is a flawed design because the game didn't guide me to any upgrades or even indicate I should be looking for them.

On the other hand, the little cute bug people almost make it worth it. You're constantly finding weird things which is cool, but it's less cool because everything in this world is trying to kill you. There aren't any moments of silent contemplation and just looking around, but the ones that exist are wonderful. Typically though, If you're not in a resting room you're fucking running from point A to point B. It doesn't leave a lot of room to admire the scenery unless you clear every room as you go, which isn't how i like to play games.

Hollow Knight seems to do everything it can to stop you from enjoying it. Other people clearly like it though, so what do I know. None of the boss fights were fun, as they all resort to insanely fast attacks to get to you that are impossible to block or dodge without hours of practice. And then you're back at a checkpoint halfway across the map, and you're more than likely going to die just walking back to the boss. It suffers from all the same problems the Souls games do, front to back.

Fallout: New Vegas is, to me, definitively the best RPG ever made. And it isn't close.

The Fallout franchise has a long and storied history that bares repeating for the sake of context. Fallout: A Post-Nuclear Role-Playing Game was created by Black Isle Studios in 1997 as an isometric, tactical CRPG. The point-and-click, turn-based game was one of the first games to rely on clever dialogue and branching quest lines and while not very popular, set a new standard for these niche types of games. Just a year later Fallout 2 was released, using the same engine and graphics as the first game.

Interplay, the publisher, rented out the license to external studios to create two poorly received spin-offs, Fallout Tactics and Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. These games attempted to spin the license into a pure overhead tactics game and an action game, but with their failure Interplay shut the franchise down and sold the near-useless Fallout IP to Bethesda Softworks. The rest, as they say, is history; Fallout is now one of the biggest gaming franchises on earth. Fallout 3 was 2008’s definitive Game of the Year. Fallout 4, despite disappointing a lot of fans, is one of the best-selling RPGs of all time, topping Bethesda’s own Skyrim and sitting second only to the juggernaut that is Pokemon. While Fallout 76 holds the esteemed title of “worst launch of all time,” the Wastelanders update has made the game playable and even pretty good. Essentially, Fallout games have a history of being all over the place.

Nestled comfortably in this complicated release history is 2010’s Fallout: New Vegas. Following the success of Fallout 3, Bethesda rented out the Fallout IP to a new studio called Obsidian Entertainment, made up of the very ex-Black Isle Studios employees that had created Fallout in the first place. Bethesda handed Obsidian the Fallout 3 engine and put them to work — and so it was that the planets aligned. All the best parts of the classic Fallout games and the Bethesda version came together to form Fallout: New Vegas, one of the greatest RPGs (and dare I say greatest games) of all time.

A quick cut scene establishes the world of Fallout: war between the US and China escalated in the year 2077 to the point of total atomic annihilation around the world. The bombs dropped and ended humanity as we know it, leaving the survivors to scrounge for food in a horrific wasteland. The Forced Evolutionary Virus escaped containment, transforming everything from scorpions to lizards to humans into grotesque mutants. Over a hundred years later, a courier travels through the Mojave desert to deliver a package. The Courier is stopped by Benny, played by Matthew Perry (Chandler from Friends), and is shot in the head when they refuse to give up the goods.

The player wakes up in the run-down home of one Doc Mitchell, a kindly old man who explains the situation and acquaints the Courier with the state of the world. He then guides you through a clever set of questions in a psych test to determine your optimal character build, but you can of course set your stats however you’d like. After point-buying from your seven S.P.E.C.I.A.L. stats (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, Luck), you’ll select a few special skills for your character to have. You design your character in a subpar character creator (but hey, it was 2010) and then it’s off to the wasteland!

New Vegas was the first Fallout game I ever played, and I had no idea what the series was about before that. More than that, though, this was the first open world game I had ever played. And the first western RPG I’d ever played as well. This was all new to me, every piece of it. New Vegas eases new players in to the post-apocalypse by introducing a compelling cast of characters in Goodsprings, the starting town, and having them drip-feed you exposition through well-written dialogue. Sunny Smiles and her dog Cheyenne walk the Courier through the basics of shooting, VATS, item management and exploration if they choose; if the player is a veteran, they can simply exit Doc Mitchell’s house and begin wandering the waste in literally any direction they choose. New Vegas does a near-perfect job teaching new players how to learn about the wasteland themselves, rather than dumping exposition and calling it a day.

The premise of the story is that you, the Courier, were delivering something called the Platinum Chip to the mysterious owner of New Vegas, Mr. House. After being shot in the head the Courier has lost their memory, and remembers only Benny’s smug face as he pulled the trigger. You’ll set out from Goodsprings to track down Chandler and get the full story out of him, dead or alive. Meanwhile, a war is brewing; two huge armies are moving slowly towards the coveted Hoover Dam, the biggest source of power in the Mojave.

The New California Republic is the remnants of the governments of six West Coast States that formed a new union upon the destruction of the United States, while Caesar’s Legion is a tribe of barbarian sex-traffickers marching from the midwest, believing they are the chosen army to achieve the glory of Rome. This is to say nothing of the aforementioned Mr. House, sitting pretty in control of New Vegas and all the food, water, electricity, drugs and luxuries that come with it. The underground militia of The Brotherhood of Steel sits quietly in the dunes waiting for their moment while the drug-pushing Great Khans stake their claim in the deserts. The Boomers have taken control of an old Air Force base up north and claimed the weapons, but there are rumors that the husk of the American Government has formed once more into the Enclave. Each and every one of these factions have a relationship with the others, and your actions determines who allies together, who betrays each other and who ultimately is victorious.

It is almost impossible to understand the moving pieces of the world as they change around you in response to your decisions. Shooting one person at the wrong time could have ramifications that reach across the deserts and through to the end of the game. Dialogue choices become available to different players depending on how they’ve statted their character, so it’s unlikely any two people have played Fallout New Vegas exactly the same way. Dialogue is more clever than it has any right to be all the way through to the end of the game, and your dialogue choices can have very immediate ramifications if you say the wrong thing. A pleasant chat can become a shootout in a matter of seconds, but hey, that’s the wasteland, baby.

The shooting in Fallout New Vegas is not good. It does improve upon its predecessor, Fallout 3, by offering a much larger assortment of guns; however, the feel of gunplay has not improved. Guns continue to be hard to aim, and moving targets are almost impossible to hit without using VATS (the lock on mechanism). There are many action RPGs in which players will try to power through the dialogue sections to reach the action, however players will likely find the reverse true in New Vegas. Utilizing the correct weapons, armor, chems and skills will give you the edge in individual fights, but the overall war will be decided by how well you can play your character, whether its a max-strength barbarian or a lucky sonofabitch. The RPG mechanics of this game are deeper than most will care to dive into, but rest assured they are there.

The companions in New Vegas are for the most part well written, interesting people that have discernible goals and will join the Courier if they believe it’ll help them reach those goals. Cass, Boone, ED-E and of course our very good boy Rex are just a few of the great characters that will accompany you, each with their own specific set of powers and skills. Dialogue and interactions with other characters will change depending on who your companion is, but be wary that they’re also keeping an eye on you. If the Courier makes too many decisions in favor of a faction they’re not aligned with, the companion will leave your party or even try to kill you. If you’re trying for a Legion playthrough, I’d advise you to assassinate Boone as quickly as possible.

Fallout New Vegas takes everything that Fallout 3 brought to the series stretches it over the skeleton of the classic games, creating something much more elegant than it has any right to be. Aside from the numerous technical problems and impossible-to-aim guns, Fallout New Vegas is a flawless masterpiece. The player will continue to be astounded that the developers thought of one thing or another and prepared for it; your choices in both dialogue and action do truly affect and alter the world around you. And endless cast of well-written characters with overwritten backstories will carry the Courier through the wastes in search of the truth and land them in a very specific position to determine how the war plays out. Although the player is always in control, most repercussions of your actions are completely unintended and leave you scrambling to figure out how to repair an alliance or take a stronghold to remedy it. Obsidian has created the most intricately crafted game ever written with excellent DLC and well over a hundred hours of content — and I didn’t even touch on mods. Get it.

Pip-boy is dead. Now, I am Pip-Man.

My first playthrough of Fallout 3 was entirely mod-free, so I’ll be reviewing it through that lens. Strap on your Pip-Boys, grab your Todd Howard collectible bobble head, and follow me into the wasteland!

It is no overstatement to say that in 2008, Fallout 3 changed the course of the entire video games industry, rerouting seemingly every project in development that may have been a linear game into an open world adventure. Oblivion was great and all, but what Fallout 3 did with its open world was unprecedented, even in Grand Theft Auto III (often credited as the father of the genre). Followed by two other open world hits, Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim, this game proved that players didn’t need or necessarily even want direction in their video games. Go anywhere, do anything. It just works.

The game begins with a quick history of what happened to the world — in 2077, the Chinese dropped bombs on the US, we returned fire, blah blah blah world is ended in a nuclear holocaust. The world of Fallout isn’t our own, though; it’s a very different one in which the transistor was never invented, cars run on nuclear energy, and 50s Americana vibes dominate popular culture. Suddenly, you’re born! (Don’t feel too bad about being born. It happens to the best of us).

Your father, Liam Neeson, pulls you from your mother’s womb as you enter this exciting new world of nuclear mutants and wasteland horrors. Your mother dies in childbirth, and your Liam Neeson dad raises you in the safety of Vault 101, one of the few underground safe havens that protects from the creatures on the surface. Your best friend, Amata, is the daughter of the Overseer, the tyrannical leader of the vault. You go through some typical growing up stuff, from baby to prepubescent teen to a grown ass 19 year old. You see some glimpses of the trials and tribulations of growing up, choosing a career, and getting bullied. Tunnel Snakes rule! This whole section is quite interesting but only lasts an hour at most, so hold on to your hat and we’ll get you out into the open world in just a bit.

Like I said, in 2008 this was a literal game changer. Leaving the vault to chase after your missing father, you step out into the world for the first time and see the expanse of the Capital Wasteland. The visuals have not aged well, but a few mods will definitely make it more bearable. I won’t get too much farther into the story of Fallout 3, of which there isn’t much. I want to focus on the world. This game, much like Skyrim, is a sandbox for you to build your own post-apocalyptic story.

There isn’t much of an overarching objective beyond “Find your dad.” There’s one simple reason I still praise this game design to this day: “Find your dad” is exactly the right balance between urgent and trivial. Most open world RPGs, including most of Bethesda’s, suffer from creating a main objective that is so urgent that if you truly want to role play you can’t do any side quests. There isn’t time for exploring when the Dragon God is attacking villages or your son has been kidnapped by the Institute. But your dad, a seasoned wastelander and capable doctor, has wandered outside of his own volition. He’ll be fine on his own, but I still want to find him. But if I stop here and check out Paradise Falls… well, it’s not a big deal.

Fallout 3 features some of the most interesting quests in RPG history. I don’t want to spoil them, but look out for Tranquility Lane, The Mechanist vs. the Ant-Agonizer, Oasis, and Our Little Secret, among others. There are less quests than you might be used to in other open world games, but each quest is a lot more substantial than you’d anticipate, all of them with multiple branching paths and conclusions. Each quest comes to you pretty organically through conversation, environmental clues, or just overhearing something interesting at the local bar. Fallout 3 features a Karma system that disappears from later games, which works just as it sounds. Do something bad and you lose karma, do something good and gain karma. Karma is said to influence events around you and determine how some NPCs interact with you, so stop stealing stuff! Or don’t.

The music is amazing. Inon Zur is as purposeful as always, matching ambient soundscapes to the marching rhythms of war. The main theme is nothing short of iconic, and is still the main theme of the Fallout franchise today. Dun dunnnn dunnnnnnnnn

Although not as fleshed out as the characters in Fallout 4 or NV, Fallout 3 does feature some great characters to team up with. Among the companions, I stuck with Fawkes the super genius Supermutant and Dogmeat, my loyal mutt from the junkyard for the majority of the game. Other characters like Charon, king of the Ghouls, Sierra Petrovita, Curator of the First National Nuka Cola Museum, and the residents of the all-child city of Little Lamplight round out a cast of interesting people to meet. The dialogue is quite well written as well, and conversations are interesting and not something you’re skipping through to get to the “good stuff.” Conversations are, for the most part, the good stuff. Sierra was my first video game wife. Well, you can’t marry her, but we’re all just doing a make pretend here.

The gun play is bad. I don’t have a lot else to say. It’s clunky and it feels bad to shoot. There’s no way to reliably aim your gun in this game that is dependent on guns. VATS is essentially a lock-on system using AP (Action Points) and is the best way to ensure you’re doing any damage to enemies. You can also pick which body part to hit with your shots, and crippling specific body parts is the most strategic way to win fights. Cripple legs to immobilize enemies, or cripple arms to make them drop their weapons. Be aware there is weapon degradation ! But no crafting needed, stop by any merchant and pay them to repair your weapons and armor. I recommend a melee build, this game is a good bit easier with a Shishkebab. The shooting has aged terribly, but again that’s not the good part of the game. VATS is a clever holdover of the combat from the first two games, sitting somewhere between turn-based and live combat.

The settings are amazing. Oasis is my favorite, but I don’t want to spoil it for you. Just head north, you’ll get there. Paradise Falls, the slave city, is very neat for a city built entirely of junk. Little Lamplight is a town of all children and entirely subterranean. Seeing the 70 story Tenpenny Tower in the middle of the desert for the first time is a wonder I will never forget. Rivet City is a whole city build into a dilapidated aircraft carrier parked right on the river. Underworld is a secret city of ghouls trapped underground. Visit the proud Republic of Dave. And when you see the White House in shambles, the Washington monument crumbling… it makes you feel something (if you’re American). It’s all so dismal, wonderful, and hopeless at the same time.

And if you’re unfamiliar with Fallout, the monsters will blow your mind. Fallout has always had some of the best monsters in video games, so this isn’t surprisng, but some of them are legitimately scary while others are simply baffling. Supermutants and ghouls are all well and good, but let’s hang out with a centaur sometime. Whenever I look at it I remember how far we have strayed from God’s light.

More than anything, this game lets you explore. You can go far and wide, or stay on the short and narrow. Care about the story or don’t. It matters exactly as much as you want it to. Find the people, go to the places, shoot the stuff, don’t shoot the stuff, I don’t care. Just go. Any direction you please.

Fallout 3 is a wonderful and depressing trip into post apocalyptic America. Go literally anywhere and do literally anything you please. If that’s scary to you, the main quest will take you all over the map. But I encourage you to stick to the road less traveled- that is to say, don’t follow the roads. Fight for good or evil, for the Brotherhood or the Enclave, for justice or chaos. Just make sure to allow yourself to feel that freedom. They keep telling you that war never changes, but more importantly you’ll find that in some terrifying ways America never changes, either.